I would like to go on record that I am neither character in this story:


One man awakens, a gloriously blazing sunshine beaming down upon his face. A successful writer, 42, handsome, fit, single. The world has been his oyster for quite some time now. Today will be another day upon the pedestal which he had been fortunate enough to have landed on, many years ago.

He pushes the button on his computer. It turns on with a crisp beep, starting up with mercurial speed. His email folder is brimming, as always, with a mixture of fan email and correspondences from his celebrity friends. His spam blocker has successfully redirected any junk emails into oblivion with perfect efficiency. He replies to the fan emails, thanking the senders for the praise, promising to buy the books that unknown authors are pushing on him, etc.

With that daily task dispatched, he heads off into his elegant kitchen, pulling a cup of freshly brewed espresso, automatically prepared from the expensive high tech gadget he purchased recently at the Sharper Image. The caffeine invigorates him as he walks out into the hallway of his million dollar condo in an upscale high rise in downtown.

A young gorgeous woman enters the hallway from the condo across the hall at precisely the same moment as him. Their eyes meet. Actually her eyes meet his face, his eyes meet her large firm breasts pushing against her tight t shirt.

“Aren’t you....?” she asks with an air of amazement.

“Yes, I am,” he replies timidly, returning his gaze to her exotically sexy face.

“I am such a fan. God I love all your books. You are such an amazing writer,” she says gushingly.

“Thank you,” he responds with a gentle smile. This is always so easy, too easy. Lately he has become somewhat self loathing at how easily the game plays out.

“I’m apartment-sitting for my boss. She never told me who she lived across from.” There’s a pause. “God, I can’t believe I’m standing here right in front of… You are my favorite writer. I’ve read all your books.”
His eyes return back to her breasts and fantasies begin running through his head. There is an awkward silence.

“You could stare all you want,” she says matter-of-factly, “Or you could just invite me in.”

He motions toward his open door and within minutes of its closing behind them, clothes are pulled off, erogenous zones stimulated, moans and groans fill the room. They make love well into the afternoon, sleep for a few hours, then go to the bistro on the ground floor of the building for an exquisite dinner, complete with expensive French Champagne. Afterwards is round two of the carnal three ring circus followed by more sleep.

Another man awakens on a different morning to the sound of rain running down the gutter outside of his bedroom window. Water is leaking in through a crack in the glass and running down the wall. Water marks streak the dingy paint on mottled drywall. He’s a writer too, yet his sales have barely broken into double digits. Once handsome and fit, the years lacking in success have taken a severe toll on him; he looks a decade beyond the 42 years he’s walked this earth.

He pushes the button on his computer, knowing that the virus ridden beast will take a good twenty minutes to start up. He has vague memories of it once being much quicker but cannot recall when this changed. Eventually he is able to open his email. Empty. Well, not entirely empty. There are over a dozen junk emails in his inbox. The sender IDs are all simple names like Josh and Drake. The subject lines are a mixture of phonied up replies (RE: how cool is that) or total gibberish (Germanial tyrantic supernovas wording effervescence). He opens the spam one by one feeling like they represent evidence that he is still connected, somehow, to the world. There are invites to buy Viagra, borrow tons of money for miniscule payments, supposed stock tips accidentally sent to him, Rolex watches for a fraction of the cost, and one from the son of a deposed King in Nigeria. With only one email remaining to be read, his computer locks up, reboots itself and then begins making a loud grinding noise.

He goes to the kitchen. From an old dented carafe, he pours a cup of cold coffee made the previous day and microwaves it. Cup in hand, he goes to get the newspaper from outside his apartment door. His sexy neighbor (he doesn’t even know her name but she is often in his fantasies) is getting her paper too. He can’t help but notice that her loose shirt gives him a nanosecond glimpse of her breasts as she bends down. He files this away for later. As she straightens up, he continues starting at her big breasts.

“Stop staring at my boobs, you fucking creep,” she says threateningly with a bitchy sneer.

Something he had recently read in a magazine the other day came to mind. A snappy comeback designed for such a situation. Perhaps she’d appreciate the humor and the attention, and accept an invitation into his apartment for coffee. Perhaps after that, even more.

“Please stop your boobs from staring at me,” he says playfully with an air of familiarity that is nowhere near justified.

“What the hell did you say,” he hears shouted from the hallway behind him in a deep male voice. Oh no, now he remembers that there’s a boyfriend. He turns just in time to take a vicious punch to the face from the girl’s boyfriend. It knocks him to the ground, and he goes unconscious for awhile.

He awakens with the taste of his own blood in his mouth and a loud ringing in his ears and goes back into his apartment to clean himself up, surprised to find that it is already early afternoon. He goes to the McDonald’s across the street and buys a double cheeseburger off the dollar menu with a handful of change he scavenged in his apartment. Back at his apartment, he washes it down with not one, but two quarts of Old English 500 Ale to pass the time during his twenty minute restart of his computer. He sits down to write but can’t come up with anything so he drinks another quart of Old E, washing down a few shots of cheap Tequila with it, and crawls into bed for a nap, which turns into a long slumber well into the evening.

Back to the first guy. Around midnight, he awakens and goes into the bathroom. Before closing the door behind him, he takes a glimpse at the divine perfection lying naked in his bed. In the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror, his eyes begin to glaze as he looses focus, and for a moment can not recognize the face staring back at him. He opens a drawer and reaches inside. “God, I’m such a fucking phony,” he says with distain quietly to himself. This thought, once a trivial notion, had grown recently into an obsession. His hand rises up bringing heavy steel to his head. The cold barrel chills his temple, moments before its payload rips through his cranium, spattering what was once his essence onto the bathroom mirror.

Back to the other guy. He’s in the bathroom violently puking into the toilet. He gets up and looks at his disheveled bloated face in the mirror. “Wow, that feels better,” he says, suddenly upbeat. “Well, tomorrow’s another day” he says with a broad smile and a tinge of insanity as a sudden epiphany fills his head, an entire story from start to finish.

Years later, while being interviewed on a famous late night talk show, he will admit, honestly, that he cannot recall how he came up with the idea for his best selling Pulitzer prize winning novel. “I think it was just my turn,” was the best he could come up with.

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